take up to seven seconds to transfer from subconscious thought to conscious thought

already has been identified and tracked through the brain before the subject even realized he had a thought

change the human identity on an individual (micro) and societal (macro) perspective

imagine and create technology that will change and effect how, what, why, and the speed of thought

(what is next?)

Boxes of sand. Boxes of time.

Standing in the desert, stretches of sand fill the eyes. From horizon to horizon… to horizon, all there is to see is sand. Hills of sand, valleys of sand, plains of sand, and sand of sand.

In the sand, I draw a long line. Then, I draw another line, perpendicular and intersecting to the first line. The centers of both are the intersecting point. I draw a box to encompass the large drawing, and fill in the empty space with equidistant lines. I have drawn a graph in the sand.

I could have drawn this graph anywhere, and I could have drawn the lines at any length and any distance from one another. However, I drew my graph in this way.

There is no grass anywhere in the box. No lizards have picked up and scurried off either. The interior of my graph is empty, blank, and void of any terrain. It is flat.

This is how I envision the scientific community has come to see time: fixed boxes of equidistance that can easily measure time within this box drawn in the sand. Again, I could have drawn the box and graph in any size and shape, but chose to create it this way on a whim. The place is important because it is flat – “void of any terrain.”

Like a metronome, the frequency of light establishes the “speed of time” in our space and dimension. Space: time exists only within space, yet space can exist without time. Dimension: our [alternate] reality and/or plain of existence. All the molecules of matter within our space and dimension, even antimatter and dark matter, vibrate within frequencies allowed by our place and fabric, as light is the speed limiter.

Time is not so easily confined, measured, or understood, however. Upon the landscape of the earth, we find hills, valleys, plateaus, plains, and all kinds of anomalies in the terrain. In fact, we identify these anomalies as normal, and thus do not identify them as anomalous. But, what about time? Is it so flat?

Standing in one place, we watch a car drive down a road that takes it up and over hills. As the car passes down the backside of the hill, we lose sight of it because the front side of the hill blocks our view. Only after the car rises above the angle of our line of sight do we recapture the car in our observation. If there were a terrain to the fabric of time, or if something created ripples in time, how would things appear to us? Would our graph, our measurement of time, do well to explain these anomalies? Or, are we accustomed to these anomalies like the terrain of earth, and we become perplexed when time has a lack of feature?

What if the graph we have placed over our small piece of “time real estate” shifts, grows or shrinks, or changes shape? How will we adapt to these anomalous elements? Should we have so much confidence in time? Or, is it temporary, and an anomaly itself?

Is time merely subjective? Merely relative? Is it a figment of our finite imagination desperately trying to grasp a concept infinite in depth, breadth, tone, color, frequency, viscosity, and duration?

Do billions of years happen in a finger snap? Or, does a finger snap happen over a billion years?

Exactly what is a time?

Where is the world?

Since I was a young boy of about four, five, or six, I have pondered the question, “Where is the world?” Where does it exist, and at what point does its existence occur?

At the time, I had only two theories:

The world exists, as it appears, outside of my body.

The world exists in my mind.

I observed that I am witness to things when awake and when asleep. I learned that it was once believed that our sight left our eyes toward an object and returned, sort of like echolocation. However, vision is a passive sense, receiving information without transmitting a signal to initiate the return. This is known as the extramission theory, and Plato (427 B.C. – 347 B.C.) developed his theory of sight “that sends out signals” based on theories from Democritus (460 B.C. – 370 B.C.) and Epicurus (341 B.C. – 270 B.C.).

Knowing the brain is the processor for all sensory inputs, at eight or nine years of age, I concluded that the world exists in the mind, and the conscious brain is the only brain that can contextualize the world [that the brain has created through its processing of information received] because creatures without self-awareness do not struggle with perspective. Following this conclusion, I struggled with what external influences created the inputs that our nervous system relays. Does the mind effect the external world? In a closed-system, there must be a loop. The Law of Conservation (of energy, mass, and/or energy-mass) states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. It can, however, change states, i.e. kinetic to potential, chemical to thermal, and so forth. If that is so and applicable to all things, is it applicable to the mind-world system? Is energy changing state from consciousness to other forms of energy?

It is not my imagination that burns my finger when I touch the hot exhaust manifold of a lawnmower. Even before I know what it is or understand what it can do, it still burns me. So, what is this? If matter is the condensation of energy, is matter and energy a transformation of psychic energy? Or, vice versa, asking if psychic energy, or consciousness, is the transmutation of energy or matter?

Is the external world the portal to another consciousness? And, are external influences, or sensory inputs, transmissions from the other side of this consciousness-consciousness loop? If so, what is the meaning? What is the message? Why are messages sent? And, who is the other consciousness?

Woods Walking

The rustle of branches and leaves through the levels of canopy here in the woods beside the lake brush clean my mind and heart. I can breath here. I can live here. This place, where the eternal blue sky nurtures a forest of pureness amongst the shimmering waters and the earth’s breath, is a house of worship. I come here to cleanse my self and to find wisdom and guidance. It is only in this natural place, not a man made place, where I can find peace.

Above my head are things greater than me. Below my feet are things greater than me. In between, I am finding my way towards the apogee I am intended for in life. When I do not know or I can not find it, I keep walking through the woods. Sometimes I stop. Sometimes I sit. Sometimes it comes to me, and other times I arrive upon it. Like the ant on the ground following its brothers and sisters in columns to and fro, I do not stop even when I am lost or confused.

The song of some mysterious and melodious bird hides a secret message. As I listen to it a-cappella, its music finds its way through the maze in my mind to the secret passage I kept walking to find. Notes on high and twitters on low twitch and click like a lock pick. Pop! Inside, the mysterious songbird unpacks the wisdom locked deep within.

The wisdom I was seeking was within me. The time to find it was only now, not before.

Next year, when this side of the lake is bulldozed to clear an area for another parking lot and residential lots for a private developer, I will have to find another walking place, another trail to the great sempiternal.

I have prayed and asked for another way, a way that will preserve and keep this walking wood beside the lake.

The time has come. This path is to change. The time has come, again, is the answer my heart witnesses.

What will I do? I ask through my heart and mind.

Again my heart witnesses an answer. This answer, however, is not to be known by thought, but felt by heart. It is comforting as though my grandmother just hugged me, took me by the hand, and is now leading me away to another place as she smiles upon me with loving looks and encouraging compliments. Her hands, old with decades of hard work, are soft and gentle despite their look.

Where the natural trail fades and meets with the sidewalk, I turn and look back. I feel good. But, I am sad, as well, because I know I will never see her, again. “Goodbye, grandma. Goodbye, woods.”

I stay a moment and watch her image fade into the living shadows of the forest, her eyes still sparkling in the sunlight as she leaves. When at the very moment of complete vanishing, I continue waving goodbye. I hope, I pray, I desperately want her to not go away.

At the end of a long goodbye, I walk back to my car, wiping my face.

Being

The religion of ancient Egypt depicts their hieroglyphs with deities often holding three things: a crook, a flail, and a staff. The crook symbolizes human emotion, the flail symbolizes the human mind, and the staff symbolizes the human body. What is most interesting is the staff is never depicted touching the ground, suggesting that we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience. Are we?

Does this explain our dreams? Does this explain where the world exists? Does this explain the innate human desire for faith, and the various religious creations of heaven and hell? When our earthly bodies expire, does this mean our spiritual being returns home?

A Lifetime in a Bedtime

There is no sound to disturb the silence when the boy slips into bed, the sheets slipping over teenage skin and prickles of apprehension. A nine-o’clock curfew has summoned this duty. For hope, outstretched eyes beckon support from his citizens – beautiful, feminine models on posters pinned from corner to corner and from floor to ceiling. In return, the boy is met with the long, cold, blank stare; white eyeballs of inanimate companions.

His last toe tucked in, his blanked tucked under-chin, and his eyes on guard, he pretends to be in bed and sleeping. He pretends to be in bed and sleeping.

He pretends to be strong and not shaking.

The veiled window allows a sister of light to enter, its curtain white and lacey, a sheen of pearl glowing heavenly. A shield of protection sent down by an angel, the boy talks to the window as though it is a longtime co-traveler.

“Will I dream, again, the same dream that has been? Will tonight be new, or the same dream will I view? Oh, please! Please, let it be new.”

The boy is only fifteen this summer. For thirty days and thirty nights, he has been plagued with a single dream. It has not changed, not even a word, not even a bird, not even a scene.

A rhythmic beat snuggles the mind.

With eyes of savagery, nostrils panting hell’s flame, hooves of heavy iron pounding the earth, mane and tail formed of the long-lost legends slain along their virtuous quests, and color so dark that even night’s shadows cast light upon their skin, these wild horses that race through man’s mind, creating the wicked, the damned, and the insane, take pursuit in rapid fashion to the boy’s imagination and fatigue, bringing with them the bedclothes of dreams and demons – the soul and its reflections in the pool of agency.

Quantum Leap

There is twenty-four hours in a day, yet only half of that, or a little less, can be recalled.

“You’re not concentrating. You need to try harder!” it is sometimes said.

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you care?” it is also sometimes said.

Lapses in time, a lack of concentration, forgetfulness, and an inability to gauge time are often explained by other people with excuses like laziness, apathy, disregard, and an overall general consensus that you are a loser.

Life sucks.

If someone had inexplicable loss of limb control, there would be empathy and a concern for that person.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t control it.” And the epic frenzy of companions scurry about, beginning the pity party.

But, if you were to replace “limb control” with “time,” then I doubt there would be the same concern.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t control it.”

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you care? You’re not concentrating hard enough. You need to try harder! This kind of disregard for yourself and others will not be tolerated—can’t be tolerated. Do you understand?”

Where is the concern? No epic frenzy here.

I have no pity for those people. Suffer. Nobody came to help me.

Sometimes, the most restful sleep is in an unexpected nap on the couch. The unrelenting tiredness of the past few weeks that keeps building is quelled in a few transient winks horizontally on the couch in the living room. Well, half-sitting and half-laying maybe. Nonetheless, a few hours later, it is most relaxing.

It was so good, the grogginess clears in minutes instead of hours, and the clock is wrong. Second and third examinations still show the clock is wrong. Only five minutes have passed. But, the results are undeniable: the fatigue is completely gone. More restful than an eight-hour nap, what causes that?

This inexplicable loss of “time control” is not anything a person decides to do. It is like a car accident: it just happens, and no one sees it coming. Afterward, their may or may not be a recall of the absence. More often than not, memory smooths over the gaps and melds the two sides so as to skip the disparity. Memory Photoshops the image of time.

Sometimes, there is evidence, such as a receipt, or an email sent, or a picture, or the unexplainable phone number saved in your cell’s contacts, or some other evidence left on the clothing being worn – mud and grease has been found before. Sometimes, this can provide a clue. Other times, it only serves to make things more baffling.

The aberrance in result to a friend’s differing recollection can cause queer effects. Loss of relationships can happen. Loss of jobs, too. Or, a hilarious moment shared between two dimwits who can not remember shit that day. Or, simply an awkward moment. Usually, though, both parties try to forget the forgetfulness. That is ironic.

Hours are not bad, they can be easily explained with a simple excuse without too much detail. Even a day can be explained with a sigh and, “That day, I don’t know. I was just feeling poopy. I was brain dead,” and finish with an exasperated response like, “Who knows what I did?! I think I just sat on the couch all day, watching TV.” Is it worse that excuses like this have to cover up missing time, or is it worse that others can readily relate to the excuses? Who is crazy, now?

A week, a month, a year… those are harder to explain.

Pictures have surfaced of yours truly pictured many times with a visiting family, doing all sorts of things: barbecuing, laughing, making funny faces, horsing around, and generally having a good time with everyone, just like normal. And, it all happened at home. However, memory serves no recollection of the two weeks the pictures have captured of the visit.

A year? What happened from 1991 to 1993? That is three years missing! The numbers 1991, 1992, and 1993 appear in the mind’s eye, memories of 1990 and 1994 appear, but only a blank comes to mind for the three years in question. It is like the files have been deleted, leaving the empty folder. It is like a black hole in the memory. Studying it, however, has proved as elusive as real black holes in outer space, as only the light aberrations can be studied. Equivalently, only the memory aberrations can be studied for gaps in time.

This disability can make life very difficult, especially around other people. Society and cultural expectations do not make it easier in any way.

Even after all this has been said, things will still continue as they were.

Lapses in time, a lack of concentration, forgetfulness, and an inability to gauge time are often explained by other people with excuses like laziness, apathy, disregard, and an overall general consensus that you are a loser.